A Health Care Coverage Step

Posted on 26 October 2018 by eehines

Alexander Acosta, Steven Mnuchin, and Alex Azar, respectively Secretaries of Labor, Treasury, and Health and Human Services, are in the process of offering one. They’re putting together a rule that would expand HRAs, Health Reimbursement Arrangements. These are plans that allow employers to reimburse employees for certain qualified health expenses. Their expansion consists of two parts:

permit[ting] employers to offer HRAs to reimburse employees for health insurance purchased in the individual market—allowing employers to provide a contribution as significant as they would have made for the premiums of a traditional employer-sponsored plan.

This is a preview of A Health Care Coverage Step. Read the full post (223 words, estimated 54 secs reading time)

Free Markets for Health Care

Posted on 24 September 2018 by eehines

Here’s an illustration of why one is badly needed. The Wall Street Journal‘s article is centered on health coverage plans, but the underlying problem is in health care provision and the monopolistic nature of both provision and coverage.

Last year, Cigna Corp and the New York hospital system Northwell Health discussed developing an insurance plan that would offer low-cost coverage by excluding some other health-care providers, according to people with knowledge of the matter. It never happened.
The problem was a separate contract between Cigna and NewYork-Presbyterian, the powerful hospital operator that is a Northwell rival. Cigna couldn’t find a way to work around restrictive language that blocked it from selling any plans that didn’t include NewYork-Presbyterian, according to the people.

This is a preview of Free Markets for Health Care. Read the full post (365 words, estimated 1:28 mins reading time)

A Next Step

Posted on 3 August 2018 by eehines

A step has been taken to mitigate the destructiveness of Obamacare. A new rule has been promulgated by the Trump administration that will

allow for the proliferation of cheaper, less-comprehensive health plans that have been restricted by the former Obama administration.

Under the rule, actual health insurance plans will be allowed that cover a range of health-related matters that more closely align with a customer’s interests. These plans also will be good for a year and be renewable for a total of three years, a drastic improvement over Obamacare’s limit of 90 days. A further improvement of this rule:

This is a preview of A Next Step. Read the full post (212 words, estimated 51 secs reading time)

Paying for Health Care

Posted on 1 August 2018 by eehines

John Cochrane correctly decried the costs of health care in today’s economy, but he has the wrong solution.

Why is paying for health care such a mess in America? Why is it so hard to fix? Cross-subsidies are the original sin.

No, cross-subsidies, “sinful” as they are, are not the original sin. The original sin is government involvement at all in the form of any sort of subsidy. Far from the subheadline’s claim that “honest subsidies” (eliding the oxymoronic nature of that label) would encourage competition and innovation, they’d do the opposite, as all subsidies do: they’d suppress competition and innovation by giving the government-favored recipients a government-mandated advantage over their government disfavored competitors, freeing the one from competition’s pressures to innovate and reducing the other’s access to resources needed to innovate—and stifling competition’s engine, the need to innovate to stay ahead of rivals.

This is a preview of Paying for Health Care. Read the full post (178 words, estimated 43 secs reading time)

AHPs

Posted on 23 June 2018 by eehines

Association Health Plans are new plans that, by regulation, allow small businesses to band together across industries and state boundaries to form health insurance buying consortiums. Using this larger size-generated buying power, they should be able to acquire cheaper, better tailored, more flexible plans for their employees, plans that those employees actually will want.

However.

The left says association plans are junk insurance that will blow up ObamaCare.

Some AHPs likely will be; that’s a fact of life in any market, free or centrally planned. However, a free market is self-regulating and quickly so; junk plans will be few and far between. Blow up Obamacare? That’s win-win.

This is a preview of AHPs. Read the full post (141 words, estimated 34 secs reading time)

Why Should There Be a Cap?

Posted on 22 June 2018 by eehines

Scott Atlas wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal that all of us should have access to health savings accounts, instead of just the few well-off among us who can afford the high deductible health coverage plan that’s currently a prerequisite for having an HSA. He also wants to raise the cap for contributing to one to $7,350 per year.

He’s on the right track, but he stopped short. Why should there be a cap on HSA contributions? Why can’t we contribute as much or as little as we want instead of what Government will permit?

This is a preview of Why Should There Be a Cap?. Read the full post (191 words, estimated 46 secs reading time)

Another Obamacare Episode

Posted on 11 June 2018 by eehines

The Justice Department has declined to defend Obamacare in the suit against it brought by a large number of States in the aftermath of Congress’ repeal of the Individual Mandate penalty tax. Recall that Chief Justice John Roberts rewrote the law in 2012 to recreate the penalty as a tax in order to preserve the IM as constitutional, and thereby to preserve all of Obamacare as constitutional because of the inseverability of all parts of the law.

With the repeal of the IM’s…tax…that inseverability should doom the rest of Obamacare.

As a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision not to defend the law,

This is a preview of Another Obamacare Episode. Read the full post (177 words, estimated 42 secs reading time)

The Veterans Administration

Posted on 1 May 2018 by eehines

…won’t clean up after itself. In this instance, literally. This is the VA “hospital” room a veteran was placed in when he went to that…facility…for treatment that involved 18 injections. Injections to be done in a room as filthy as this.

Dr Karen Gribbin, the chief of staff at the George E Wahlen Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center, on Saturday reportedly said that Wilson should not have been in the room. She said the rooms should be cleaned prior to each patient and called on an investigation.

Wahlen is the imitation hospital at which this failure occurred. The vetaran’s father, who posted the tweet, also tweeted

This is a preview of The Veterans Administration. Read the full post (398 words, 1 image, estimated 1:36 mins reading time)

An Unintended Consequence

Posted on 15 March 2018 by eehines

The health coverage plan providers, companies like Humana, Aetna, Anthem, et al., are gaming the Medicare system to keep their Medicare bonuses coming in. Surprise.

It seems that when Obamacare was passed, it included a system of paying bonuses from Medicare to those plan providers that got sufficiently high ratings on the quality of their plans.

But wait….

Medicare ranks privately managed plans…on a five-star quality scale and provides financial bonuses to providers of top-ranked plans. [A plan-holder’s] plan was set to be downgraded, which would have cost Humana its bonus. So the company merged plans covering [the plan-holder] and more than a million others into different contracts with higher scores. That preserved the bonuses.

This is a preview of An Unintended Consequence. Read the full post (264 words, estimated 1:03 mins reading time)

A New Insurance Plan

Posted on 16 February 2018 by eehines

Idaho has one. Blue Cross of Idaho says it’s going to take advantage of newly issued State regulations to start marketing a plan that won’t meet Obamacare requirements, and they’re going to sell the plan alongside its existing Obamacare-compliant plans.

The Idaho Department of Insurance last month became the first state regulator to say it would let insurers begin offering “state-based plans” for consumers that involved practices generally banned for individual insurance under the ACA, including tying premium rates to enrollees’ pre-existing health conditions.

In particular,

This is a preview of A New Insurance Plan. Read the full post (216 words, estimated 52 secs reading time)

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